Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6011. Does God cause suffering, or does He only allow it? I have stood at enough hospital beds and gravesides to know this is never an academic question. How you answer it shapes whether you can trust God on the worst day of your life. If He directly causes every agony, He begins to…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60201 The question is a classic philosophical puzzle, usually deployed as a challenge to the coherence of believing in God at all. It runs like this: if God is all-powerful, can He create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it? If He can create it, then there is something He cannot do…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06016 The book of Job is the Bible’s most sustained engagement with the problem of innocent suffering, and it remains one of the most honest, unsettling, and ultimately profound books in all of Scripture. Job’s story demolishes simplistic explanations of suffering while pointing toward something far deeper than any of his friends were able…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60112 When someone we love suffers, the instinct to help is immediate and strong — but so is the sense of helplessness. What do you say to the person whose child has died, whose diagnosis is terminal, whose marriage has collapsed, whose life has been shattered by tragedy? The temptation is either to say…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60110 Few questions in pastoral ministry provoke more anguish than this one. A believer prays earnestly for healing, trusts God sincerely, and yet the healing does not come. The result is often confusion, guilt, or a quiet crisis of faith. The question deserves a careful, honest, and compassionate answer, because the stakes are not…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 60005 Dragons appear in the mythology and folklore of cultures around the world. From the fire-breathing beasts of European legend to the serpentine dragons of Chinese tradition, these creatures have captured human imagination for millennia. But were dragons merely products of imagination, or do these legends preserve memories of real encounters? As we shall…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08139 Whether angels experience something analogous to human emotion is a question the Bible does not answer systematically, but it does offer a number of passages that present angelic beings as responding to events with what looks remarkably like genuine feeling. The question matters because it touches on what it means to be a…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 08135 Angels are spiritual beings of immense power and long experience, but they are not God. That distinction matters enormously when considering the scope of their knowledge. Scripture presents angelic intelligence as genuinely superior to human understanding in many respects, while also marking clear limits that set their knowledge apart from the omniscience that…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06032 When Jesus addressed lust in the Sermon on the Mount, He was not introducing a new standard. He was revealing the standard that had always been there, the one that an outward-focused reading of the law had managed to obscure. By reaching behind the act to the intention of the heart, He made…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6040 Few questions press harder on faith than this one. A faithful believer loses a child to cancer while a corrupt businessman retires in comfort. A woman who has served God for decades is consumed by chronic pain, while someone who gives no thought to God at all seems to sail through life without…